Dr. Atkins' New Diet Cookbook
Read Dr. Atkins' New Diet Cookbook Online
Authors: Robert C. Atkins
Tags: #Cooking, #Health & Healing, #General, #Low Fat
D
R
.ATKINS’
NEW
DIET
COOKBOOK
R
.ATKINS’
NEW
DIET
COOKBOOK
B
Y
R
OBERT
C. A
TKINS
,
M.D., AND
F
RAN
G
ARE, M.S.
We would like to especially acknowledge Nancy Mahoney, M.S., R.D., for her nutritional research on the recipes.
Copyright © 1994, 1997 by Robert C. Atkins, M.D.
1995 Trade paperback edition
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher.
M. Evans and Company, Inc.
4501 Forbes Blvd., Suite 200
Lanham, MD 20706
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Atkins, Robert C.
[New Diet Cookbook]
Dr. Atkins’ new diet cookbook / Robert C. Atkins ; with recipes
and meal plans by Fran Gare
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-87131-794-0
1. Reducing diets. I. Mandell, Fran Gare. II. Title.
RM222.2.A842 1994
613.2’5—dc20
94-1273
CIP
Design by Bernard Schleifer and Charles A. de Kay
Typeset by Not Just Another Pretty Face
Manufactured in the United States of America
Distributed by National Book Network
1-800-462-6420
The advice offered in this book, although based on the author’s experience with many thousands of patients, is not intended to be a substitute for the advice and counsel of your personal physician. Pregnant women and people with severe kidney disease are strongly advised not to follow this diet.
The Yeast-Free Maintenance Diet
Special Menus for Entertaining
Introduction
You have all seen diet cookbooks, but for the past 20 years I suspect you haven’t seen one like this. This isn’t a copycat cookbook. It doesn’t attempt to refurbish and bring to life the tired and repetitious diet styles of the recent past. in fact, if you start leafing through the recipes, you’ll be in for the shock of your life.
Where’s the diet?
you’ll say. What happened to the austerity? No austerity, no diet, right?
Wrong!
What sort of diet is this, then? Just glance at the wonderful, mouth-watering recipes Fran Gare has prepared for this book. Yes, they appear nondietetic because they’re
not
fat-restricted. You quickly notice that oil, butter, and mayonnaise appear in them.
Why, Dr. Atkins, this is not the food of weight loss!
You tremble. Don’t! This is the food of weight loss, and you can become slim eating it. (And, better yet, healthy.) But, I have to tell you that if you’re relying on fat restriction to get you slim, this cookbook is certainly not for you.
On the other hand, if, like so many of the people I meet, you’ve been trying fat restriction and getting nowhere, I’ll hazard a guess that this cookbook and the diet principles that go with it are exactly what you need
.
You need a new start; new principles; a diet that works.
The success I promise is not done by magic. Low-carbohydrate dieting is the answer, and that means the application of well-attested facts about overweight that you’ve probably never heard about. Quite simply, since the late 1970s a simplistic theory of weight loss that focuses obsessively on dietary fat and by implication teaches the old, stale doctrine that gaining or losing weight is just a matter of calorie consumption has ruled the roost.
To know how simplistic it is to look at overweight that way, you only have to consider the different people you know, their different body types, and their different levels of appetite. Right away you’ll see that there’s no necessary connection between how much you eat and how heavy you are or between eating a lot of fat and being fat. You’ve surely noticed that folks who eat bacon and eggs for breakfast aren’t consistently overweight. Nor folks who eat steaks or butter. Yet the restriction of fat has become the basis of a whole new weight-loss industry. Weight Watchers and its many imitators wage the battle of the bulge. Low-fat tips crowd the pages of women’s magazines, and dire warnings resound from medical authorities on high.
And, as a result, we as a nation are without question and by all statistical measures eating less fat. The American public must be getting slimmer. Is it? That’s a question I can easily answer. NHANES, the major government survey that tracks the weight patterns of the nation, found just last year that from 1980 to 1990, the percentage of overweight American adults went up from 26 percent of the population to 34 percent—a truly massive and astonishing 30 percent jump. If pudge-proneness is a virus, then tens of millions of us caught it even as we struggled to obey our antifat mentors.
Food for thought here. I know I haven’t shocked you enough, so let me talk about eating. After all, this is a book that promises to be a source of the richest and most diverse dining pleasure. Disguise it though they may, most diet cookbook authors want to teach you how you can like carrot sticks and granola, skim milk and skinless chicken, celery stalks and butterless toast. They set a hard task for themselves. In their attempt to deploy a few delicious salads (though no more delicious than the ones our own Fran Gare will reveal to you), they are fundamentally working from poverty. Good cuisine has always rooted itself firmly in luxurious fat. That’s why I feel confident you’re going to relate to a diet and a cookbook that allows you New England Clam Chowder and Spicy Spareribs, Steak Au Poivre, Pâté and Roast Chicken, Duck in Red Wine, and desserts like Cheesecake and Chunky Chocolate Ice Cream.
I can see your mouth has fallen open, partly from appetite and partly from disbelief.
Dr. Atkins
, you’re saying,
I heard you mention the merits of low carbohydrate dieting and I was perfectly willing to suspend my disbelief, but this is beyond the beyond. I’ve been reading magazine articles for the past dozen years trying to wean me from these delights. You’re not serious!
So, what gives? I’ll tell you frankly out of my experience in advising overweight patients for a quarter of a century. In spite of all the hoopla and hysteria of the preceding years, most overweight men and women are
not
particularly sensitive to dietary fat.
What makes them fat and keeps them fat is a disorder of their
carbohydrate
metabolism. The foods they can’t handle are
carbohydrate
foods. Trying to lose weight by fat restriction is torture for them because it doesn’t address the
carbohydrate
basis of their problem.
Many of our major health problems and most of our weight problems are indeed nutritional, but they spring from eating the refined, processed, and devitalized food of the modern world, not from eating too many steaks or chicken breasts. I’d like to assure you that the health-problem foods that are really waiting to ambush you are sugar and sweeteners, hydrogenated oils and white flour, margarine and soda pop.
Do you realize that if you’re overweight, there’s a better than 90 percent chance that you have a problem with blood sugar and insulin levels? There’s a very good chance that you are or will become diabetic. You’re putting yourself at risk for heart disease. You probably suffer from fatigue and irritability that’s totally curable if you eat a low-carbohydrate diet. And there’s sound scientific evidence for what I’m telling you now that is largely being ignored.
I’d like to see you on the Atkins diet not just because it will slim you down remarkably, not just because it’s delightful to imagine eating the delicious recipes Fran has prepared for you, but because you deserve to be a healthy person. The Atkins diet is a diet that reverses hypertension, controls diabetes, ends fatigue, corrects many eating and digestive disorders, and greatly reduces allergies.
Low-carbohydrate diets have often gotten a bum rap in the press and for that reason I hope that before you go on the Atkins diet you’ll begin by having blood tests and measuring your blood pressure. After you’ve been on the diet for a few weeks, have these numbers checked again. Then, if your family or friends criticize you for doing something so unorthodox as ignoring the low-fat dogmas prevalent now, you’ll be able to point to the irrefutable, numerical improvements in such health indicators as cholesterol and triglyceride levels and blood pressure. There’s nothing like showing people that you’re getting healthy even while they’re watching you get slim.
If—as is most likely—you’re among the overweight to whom my description of carbohydrate sensitivity applies, then your weight problem is caused by a problem with insulin, the hormone produced in the pancreas that we cannot live without. This is a scientific fact never mentioned in the weight-loss manuals of the antifat brigades.
Yet obesity is almost always found together with an excessive release of insulin after eating
, the medical term for which is hyperinsulinism. When you eat, your body produces blood sugar (glucose). If you eat carbohydrate food, especially the refined carbohydrates I mentioned above, the glucose level goes up rapidly. Insulin is released to lower it. The insulin enables some of that glucose to be used for energy and stores the rest as . . . fat.
In fact, one wise scientist referred to insulin as “the fat-producing hormone.”
Now if you want to lose weight, I’ve just told you the secret. Simply restrict the foods that stimulate excessive insulin release. Carbohydrates provide that kind of stimulation. Fats and proteins don’t.
You simply need to severely restrict your consumption of carbohydrates (down to one or two small salads a day to start with), and you’re on a weight-loss plan that has an unparalleled record of success.
And success doesn’t stop when the pounds are off. I know you don’t just want to lose weight, you want to keep it off.
Weight regain is the demon that bedevils dieters. They put time and effort and high hopes into adhering to a diet, and they lose 20 or 30, or perhaps 60 or 70 pounds, and then, presto, six months or eight months or a year after the diet is done they’re back up where they were before. It’s almost worse than never having lost.
No need for that on this diet plan. The Atkins maintenance diet is a natural transition from the initial weight-loss diet, and on it the vast majority of my dieters maintain their slimness. The lifetime diet you can move into once you’re at your ideal weight is a healthy omnivorous diet that includes meats, fish, fowl, vegetables, nuts, seeds, grains, and fruits and starches in moderation.
Let me mention just a few things—besides good food—that you can expect to experience on the Atkins diet. Those of you who want to do the diet would be well advised to obtain
Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution
and learn step-by-step the essentials of successful low-carbohydrate
dieting. I know many of you already have and now you’re turning to this cookbook to make your diet experience more enjoyable. For those of you who are newcomers to the Atkins diet, this chapter aims to make it possible for you to begin the diet and carry it through with success. The final pages of this chapter will explain the four stages of the Atkins lifetime-diet plan.